Occasionally one accepts the fact that there is a company called News Corp, just as occasionally one accepts that there are terrorists, or that there are people who scam grandmothers out of their savings. And then Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp does something so rapacious, so pathetic, that one must stand up and say no more, and call for all legal and moral measures to stop it. The latest? News Corp’s scandal sheet, the New York Post, reported that a baseball Hall of Famer was blackmailed into cooperating with a best-selling biography written about him — blackmailed under threat that the woman writer would otherwise claim the Hall of Famer was gay. Sandy Koufax, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Hall of Famer, was the subject of the only recent best-selling baseball biography written by a woman. He has now quit as a special instructor for the Dodgers because the team is also owned by News Corp. The New York Post previously published another homophobic gossip item last spring that led Mike Piazza of the New York Mets to feel he had to publicly announce he was not gay. News Corp also owns Fox Television, Fox News Channel, and other companies which produce products structurally similar to “news.” And News Corp also owns Harper Collins publishers — the very company that printed the biography about Koufax in the first place. Their book. Their tabloid. Their team. Their scandal. It stinks. Just like News Corp does.

I worked for that company for three years. They were swine. Many companies are swine. This is something else. This is the triangulation of swine — three bullies beating up one kid called decency. I still have a contract with the publishers, Harper Collins, to write a sports book. I will not write it for them. I’m sending the money back. They certainly could use the dough. It might enable Rupert Murdoch and his employees to buy their souls back.